One casualty is Schwarzenegger’s hopes of winning voter approval in November of an $11.1 billion water bond issue. Fearing voter rejection, Schwarzenegger and the Legislature have delayed a vote for two years.

Another of Schwarzenegger’s legacy accomplishments, moving legislative redistricting to an independent commission, is also in jeopardy. Proposition 27, sponsored by Democratic politicians and their allies, seeks to return redistricting to an incumbent-friendly Legislature.

Finally, what Schwarzenegger hopes will be his most noteworthy achievement, a groundbreaking effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, could be undermined by another ballot measure, Proposition 23, financed by oil companies. It would delay implementation of the 2006 anti-greenhouse gas measure, Assembly Bill 32, until the state’s unemployment rate had fallen to less than half its current mark.

Defeating Proposition 23 is clearly Schwarzenegger’s highest priority during the remaining months of his governorship.

“It’s very important,” he beseeched Bay Area business leaders recently. “Do not let those oil companies from Texas get away with that, to come in and to form kind of partnerships with coal mines and with coal companies and with other big polluters, with other oil companies and to go and to tell us what kind of environmental regulations and laws we should have. I mean that’s outrageous.”

As the campaign over Proposition 23 develops, Schwarzenegger’s Air Resources Board is continuing to draft the complex array of regulations to implement AB 32, often battling with specific business groups that the new emission rules would affect.

There are, however, hints that the administration is stringing out the regulatory process to dampen anger that would fuel the campaign for Proposition 23.

Tellingly, in response to a lawsuit and the lack of a state budget, the board has delayed collection of millions of dollars of new fees on business to enforce the law. The new timetable calls for starting fee collection in November, after the election.

Last month, board officials also revealed that regulations on diesel trucks and machinery, which had generated much angst in the recession-clobbered construction industry, would also be postponed until November. And rule making and legislation to toughen the standard for renewable electric power sources are in stall mode.

It could all be coincidence, of course. But it’s likely that Schwarzenegger, et al., want to lie low for a few months to see which way the political wind will blow.